…is that my public career continues to flourish and expand even at a time when the music I love, the music I write, the music I champion, the music on which I am the world’s leading expert, is utterly out of fashion in every segment of musical society. No one believes me; the terms I have defined are allegedly meaningless, the movements I chronicle are said not to exist, even the existence of Downtown music itself, which was around for two decades before I started writing about it, is deemed chimerical – and yet people keep paying me to write about it. Ultimately I suppose I should take it as a tremendous compliment to my personal magnetism that while no one wants what I have to sell, they nevertheless can’t resist frequenting my shop.